According to
a New York Times report published Monday,
DraftKings and FanDuel, two of the biggest companies in DFS, are
mired in"what amounted to allegations of insider
trading, that employees were placing bets on information not
available to the public."

It went down like this.

As explained by Chris Grove at the trade
journal
Legal Sports Report, a DraftKings
employee allegedly "inadvertently released data" about
DraftKings' biggest tournament before the NFL games started,
which showed "the prevalence of particular players across all
submitted lineups for the contest."

That's of pretty serious consequence, since in DFS, you're
selecting from the same pool of players as all other users. As
was explained to us earlier, if you're going to win DFS
tournaments against thousands of other players, you need to find
overlooked players that are going to perform — giving a huge
advantage to anybody who has perfect information about how
players are being selected.

But DFS carriers are now firing back at those allegations.

Today, in a statement to Tech Insider, DraftKings denied that its
employee could have used information that gave him an unfair
advantage on FanDuel.

Here's the company's full statement, with our own line
spacing and emphasis added for readability:

There has been some confusion regarding a recent piece of data
that was inadvertently posted on DraftKings' blog containing
information about players and fantasy games. Some reports are
mischaracterizing the situation and implying that there was
wrongdoing. We want to set the record straight.

For the last several days, DraftKings has been conducting a
thorough investigation, including examining records of internal
communications and access to our database, interviewing our
employees, and sharing information regarding the incident with
FanDuel.

The evidence clearly shows that the employee in question did not
receive the data on player utilization until 1:40 p.m. ET on
Sunday, September 27. Lineups on FanDuel locked at 1:00 p.m. that
day, at which point this employee (along with every other person
playing in a FanDuel contest) could no longer edit his player
selections.

This clearly demonstrates that this employee could not
possibly have used the information in question to make decisions
about his FanDuel lineup. Again, there is no evidence
that any information was used to create an unfair advantage, and
any insinuations to the contrary are factually incorrect.

And here's the joint statement from the Fantasy Sports
Trade Association, FanDuel, and DraftKings, again with added line
spacing and emphasis:

The Fantasy Sports Trade Association (FSTA), DraftKings and
FanDuel have always understood that nothing is more important
than the integrity of the games we offer to fans.

For that reason, the FSTA has included in its charter that member
companies must restrict employee access to and use of competitive
data for play on other sites. At this time, there is no evidence
that any employee or company has violated these rules.

That said, the inadvertent release of non-public data by
a fantasy operator employee has sparked a conversation among
fantasy sports players about the extent to which industry
employees should be able [to] participate in fantasy sports
contests on competitor sites.

We've heard from users that they would appreciate more clarity
about the rules for this issue. In the interim, while the
industry works to develop and release a more detailed policy,
DraftKings and FanDuel have decided to prohibit employees
from participating in online fantasy sports contests for
money.

So while DraftKings denies "unfair advantage," it and FanDuel
have decided "to prohibit employees from participating in
online fantasy sports contests for money."